Monthly Archives: September 2008

Recently I was asked by a customer for an R16 evaluation unit. After dispatching the unit it appeared the R16 would be in good company, namely; Citrix, F5, Jetnexus and CIA. The customer was evaluating a unit from all the above manufactures. Win or lose I felt this would be an interesting independent test of the R16 against some well know names………

Loadbalancer.org are one of a number of vendors that pride themselves on offering affordable load balancing appliances that work. It is the likes of such companies that have collectively driven down the price of these solutions, making load balancing appliances available to companies who previously would not have been in a position to consider such investments.Kemp Technologies are a similar company who’s primary marketing drive centre’s around ‘value for money’. It is because of this glaring similarity that I decided to compare SSL performance capabilities, focusing on the entry-level appliance on offer from each vendor. Specification comparisons were taken, and subsequent performance tests examined whether performance levels met that of the stated specification. Results proved extremely interesting!

A few months ago on my personal blog I wrote about the difficulty of installing CentOS on the Dell R200, owing to the SATA DVD drive used in the unit. The R200 is our unit of choice for our ClusterScale “Pegasys” product, so installing Linux distros on this server is a regular occurrence for us. Fortunately, we got hold of a Redhat driver image from Dell and we managed to load it on using a USB key. This is a simple case of typing linux dd at the installation command prompt, but note that you must copy the .img file onto the USB disk, rather than the files within the image itself.

Originally the problem was with CentOS 5.0, but as far as I know it’s still a problem with versions 5.1 and 5.2. Ubuntu installations do not seem to pose the same problem, so presumably they bundle SATA DVD drivers with the distro. I still can’t find this particular driver on the Dell site, so seems like a good idea to host it here too.